Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty 1931-2007, American philosopher. b. New York City. After studying at the Univ. of Chicago (B.A. 1949, M.A. 1952) and Yale (Ph.D. 1956), Rorty taught philosophy at Wellesley College (1958-61) and Princeton (1961-82), humanities at the Univ. of Virginia (1982-98), and literature at Stanford Univ. (1998-2005). Although he edited The Linguistic Turn (1967), which is considered an indispensable introduction to analytic philosophy, Rorty soon experienced doubts about philosophy as a privileged investigation of truth and published his well-known and extremely influential work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), in which he attacked the traditional idea of philosophy as a form of higher knowledge. He subsequently advocated a form of pragmatism that drew on the insights of Darwin, Hegel, and others as well as those of Dewey and was marked by a rejection of what he saw as the scientism- and metaphysics-tainted concerns of modern epistemology. His later works include Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1988), Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (1991), Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America (1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999).

Bibliography: See interviews with Rorty ed. by D. Nystrom and K. Puckett (1998) and E. Mendieta (2006); studies by H. J. Saatkamp, Jr., ed. (1995), R. A. Kuipers (1997), M. Melkonian (1999), R. B. Brandom, ed. (2000), A. Malachowski, ed. (1990 and 4 vol., 2002), and C. Guignon and D. R. Hiley, ed. (2003).

Rorty, Richard (1931–), philosopher and leading exponent of neopragmatism.Educated at Chicago and Yale, Richard Rorty taught philosophy at Princeton before taking a chair as humanities professor at the University of Virginia in 1982. In 1998, he became Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford. These institutional moves followed and partly expressed his philosophical conversion from conventional analytic philosophy to a pragmatism that emphasized the poetic. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) revealed the logic of his conversion by presenting a systematic, immanent critique of analytic philosophy of language, mind, and epistemology, showing that analytic philosophy's own developing arguments progressively dismantle its founding project and lead to the sort of pragmatism Rorty favors. Rorty's pragmatism was mainly inspired by John Dewey, though it was strengthened by his continuing use of influential analytic ideas (e.g., those of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson). It is also enriched by integrating contemporary continental thought, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.

Rorty's main philosophical doctrines include the rejection of the correspondence theory of truth (i.e., that truth mirrors an altogether mind‐independent reality) and the quest for indubitable foundations for knowledge. Such antifoundationalism is complemented by anti‐essentialism about concepts, a recognition of the changing historicity of human thought and the inescapable hermeneutic and linguistic dimension of experience. Inspired, perhaps, by Dewey's example as a public intellectual, Rorty also turned his attention to politics. In defending progressive liberalism against Marxist critiques from the cultural left, Rorty made two firm but controversial distinctions: the private versus the public spheres, and cultural versus real politics. His writings in the 1990s defended the value of American patriotism for achieving political reform toward greater democracy. In these views and others, he highlighted the power of poetic imagination over standard scientific thought.

Bibliography

Richard Rorty , Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989.
Richard Rorty , Philosophical Papers, 3 vols., 1991.
John Pettegrew, ed., A Pragmatist's Process?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual Culture, 2000.

Richard M. Shusterman